April Fools – Ring Wraiths Protest at Temple Square

Residents of Salt Lake City were greeted by an unusual sight Friday when nine figures cloaked in black chained themselves to the gate to the Salt Lake City LDS Temple Grounds.
“It was business as usual. I was driving to work, and I looked over and saw what looked like a crowd of people dressed up like Ghosts of Christmas Past,” remarked local resident Darrel Russell Merrill.

A leader of the group, which calls itself the Nazgul, would only identify himself as the Witch-King of Angmar. He said they were protesting the vicarious temple ordinances members of the LDS faith routinely perform on behalf of deceased individuals.

“I don’t know where they got our names,” Mr. Witch King said, his ethereal eyes glowing with hellish fire. “We try and keep that information secret, we’re not even listed in the Numenor phone directory, but this just isn’t right. For one thing, we’re not even dead yet — our bodily forms have only faded over time. So far as I understand it, you need to be deceased before they should do this stuff.”

“Plus,” he continued, “did it ever occur to anyone that maybe we didn’t want to be Mormon? Khamal here is a Presbyterian.”

The protest came to an abrupt end when Utah State Troopers arrived and discovered the protesters had Morgul blades, dripping with black poison of the East, hidden beneath their black robes. The nine ringwraiths now all face concealed weapons charges, as well as supplemental misdemeanors for cruelty to animals and parking violations for their fell beasts.

According to D. Morgan Hansen, a spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, it’s unlikely that the Church will press formal charges against the Nine Riders. “I think we can come to some kind of understanding,” Hansen said. “If each of them just take a minute or two to fill out a simple four generation chart, there’s no reason we can’t all forget this ever happened. Then these gentlemen can return to their jobs at IBM.”

Comments

Yes, yes, 4 Generation charts! And what about their family group sheets? I heard I had a bunch of inactive cousins in Utah, and I think my g-grandfather was a wraith. Anyone else out there? Maybe we can find some relatives right here in the Bloggernacle!

Wooo–the places we could take the church=tolkien comparisons. The numbers are a bit off, but we’ve got the Three and the Twelve, powerful men who slowly grow more wizened but seem to live forever and who work their priesthood magics in those towers (maybe they’re more like the Istari than the Nine). And it wouldn’t be too much of stretch to compare the Salt Lake Valley in the summertime with the plains of Mordor.

Kulturblog

Time to update Susan’s post from August of 07. “They say that these are not the best of times, But they’re the only times I’ve ever known. And I believe there is a time for meditation In cathedrals of our own.” -Billy Joel, Summer Highland Falls

NOTE: This is an essay I wrote as an undergraduate at the University of Utah almost thirty years ago. I am republishing it here as a remembrance of my favorite professor, Mark Strand, upon the occasion of his passing. Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live… […]